During the time Jack is investigating Judge Irwin's background, Tommy
Stark, drunk, wraps his car around a tree, severely injuring the young girl
riding with him. Her father, a trucker, raises a tremendous noise about the
accident, but he is quieted when he is reminded that truckers drive on
state highways and many truckers have state contracts. Lucy is livid about
Tommy's crash, even though Tommy is unhurt; she insists that Willie make
him stop playing football and living his rambunctious life, but Willie says
that he won't see his son turn into a sissy, and that he wants Tommy to
have fun.
Willie is, during this time, completely committed to his six-million-dollar
hospital project, and he insists, to Jack's bemusement, that it will be
completed without any illicit wheeling and dealing. Willie is furious when
Tiny Dufiy tries to convince him to give the contract to Gummy Larson, a
Mac-Murfee supporter who would throw his support to Willie if he received
the building contract. (He would also throw a substantial sum of money to
Tiny himself.) But Willie insists that the project will be completely
clean, and seems to think of it as his legacy--he even says that he does
not care whether it wins him any votes. He insists as well that Jack
convince Adam Stanton to run it.
Jack knows that Adam hates the entire Stark administration, but he visits
his friend's apartment to make the offer nevertheless. Adam is outraged,
but he seems tempted when Jack points out how much good he would be able to
do as director of the hospital. Eventually, after Anne becomes involved,
Adam agrees to take the job. He has a conversation with Willie during which
Willie espouses his moral theory--that the only thing for a man to do is
create goodness out of badness, because everything is bad, and the only
reason something becomes good is because a person thinks it makes things
better. Adam is wary of Willie, but he still takes the job--after he
receives Willie's promise not to interfere in the running of the hospital.
During this time Jack learns that Anne has found out that Adam received the
offer to run the hospital. She visits Jack, and says that she desperately
wants Adam to take it. In a moment of bitterness, Jack tells her about how
her father illegally protected Judge Irwin after he took the bribe. Anne is
crushed; but she visits Adam with the information, and that is what prompts
Adam to compromise his ideals and take the directorship. Anne, Adam, and
Jack attend a speech Willie gives, during which he announces his intention
to give the citizens of the state free medical care and free educations.
Anne asks urgently if Willie really means it, and Jack replies, "How the
hell should I know?"
But something nags the back of Jack's mind: he is unable to figure out how
Anne learned that Adam had been offered the directorship of the hospital.
Adam didn't tell her, and Willie says that he didn't tell her, and Jack
didn't tell her. He finds out that Sadie Burke told her, in a jealous
rage—for Sadie says that Anne is Willie's new slut, that she has become his
mistress. Jack is shocked, but when he visits Anne, she gives him a
wordless nod that confirms Sadie's accusation.
Chapter 7 Summary
After learning about Anne's afiair with Willie Stark, Jack ees westward. He
spends several days driving to California, then, after he arrives, three
days in Long Beach. On the way, he remembers his past with Anne Stanton,
and tries to understand what happened that led her to Willie. When they
were children, Jack spent most of his time with Adam Stanton, and Anne
simply tagged along. But the summer after his junior year at the State
University, when he was twenty-one and Anne was seventeen, Jack fell in
love with Anne, and spent the summer with her. They played tennis together,
and swam together at night, and pursued an increasingly intense physical
relationship-- Jack remembers that Anne was not prudish, that she seemed to
regard her body as something they both possessed, and that they had to
explore together. Two nights before Anne was scheduled to leave for her
boarding school, they found themselves alone in Jack's house during a
thunderstorm, and nearly made love for the first time--but Jack hesitated,
and then his mother came home early, ending their chance. The next day Jack
tried to convince Anne to marry him, but she demurred, saying that she
loved him, but seemed to feel that something in his unambitious character
was an impediment to her giving in to her love. After Anne left for school,
they continued to write every day, but their feelings dwindled, and the
next few times they saw each other, things were difierent between them.
Over Christmas, Anne wouldn't let Jack make love to her, and they had a
fight about it. Eventually the letters stopped, and Jack got thrown out of
law school, and began to study history, and then eventually he was married
to Lois, a beautiful sexpot whose friends he despised and who did not
interest him as a person. Toward the end of their marriage, he entered into
a phase of the Great Sleep, and then left her altogether.
After two years at a very refined women's college in Virginia, Anne
returned to Burden's Landing to care for her ailing father. She was engaged
several times but never married, and after her father died, she became an
old maid, though she kept her looks and her charm. She devoted herself to
her work at the orphanage and her other charities. Jack feels as though she
could never marry him because of some essential confidence he lacked, and
that she was drawn to Willie Stark because he possessed that confidence.
Jack also feels that because he revealed to Anne the truth of her father's
duplicity in protecting Judge Irwin after he accepted the bribe, he is
responsible for Anne's afiair with Willie. But he tries to convince himself
that the only human motivation is a certain kind of biological compulsion,
a kind of itch in the blood, and that therefore, he is not responsible for
Anne's behavior.
He says this attitude was a "dream" that made his trip west deliver on its
promise of "innocence and a new start"--if he was able to believe the
dream.
Chapter 8 Summary
Jack drives eastward back to his life. He stops at a filling station in New
Mexico, where he picks up an old man heading back to Arkansas. (The old man
was driven to leave for California by the Dust Bowl, but discovered that
California was no better than his home.) The old man has a facial twitch,
of which he seems entirely unaware. Jack, thinking about the twitch,
decides that it is a metaphor for the randomness and causelessness of life--
the very ideas he had been soothing himself with in California, ideas which
excused him from responsibility for Willie and Anne's afiair--and begins to
refer to the process of life as the "Great Twitch."
Feeling detached from the rest of the world because of his new "secret
knowledge," as he calls the idea of the Great Twitch, Jack visits Willie
and resumes his normal life. He sees Adam a few times and goes to watch him
perform a prefrontal lobotomy on a schizophrenic patient, which seems to
him another manifestation of the Great Twitch. One night, Anne calls Jack,
and he meets her at an all-night drugstore; she tells him that a man named
Hubert Coffee tried to offer Adam a bribe to throw the building contract
for the new hospital to Gummy Larson. In a rage, Adam hit the man, threw
himout, and wrote a letter resigning from his post as director of the
hospital.
Anne asks Jack to convince Adam to change his mind; Jack says that he will
try, but that Adam is acting irrationally, and therefore may not listen to
reason. He says he will tell Willie to bring charges against Hubert Coffee
for the attempted bribe, which will convince Adam that Willie is not
corrupt, at least when it comes to the hospital. Anne offers to testify,
but Jack dissuades her--if she did testify, he says, her afiair with Willie
would become agrantly and unpleasantly public. Jack asks Anne why she has
given herself to Willie, and Anne replies that she loves Willie, and that
she will marry him after he is elected to the Senate next year.
Willie agrees to bring the charges against Coffee, and Jack is able to
persuade Adam to remain director of the hospital. That crisis is
averted,but a more serious crisis arises when a man named Marvin Frey--a
man, not coincidentally, from MacMurfee's district--accuses Tom Stark of
having impregnated his daughter Sibyl. Then one of MacMurfee's men visits
Willie and says that Marvin Frey wants Tom to marry his daughter--but that
Frey will see reason if, say, Willie were to let MacMurfee win the Senate
seat next year. Willie delays his answer, hoping to come up with a better
solution.
In the meantime, Jack goes to visit Lucy Stark at her sister's poultry
farm, where he explains to her what has happened with Tom. Lucy is
crestfallen, and says that Sibyl Frey's child is innocent of evil and
innocent of politics, and deserves to be cared for.
Willie comes up with a shrewd solution for dealing with MacMurfee and Frey.
Remembering that MacMurfee owes most of his current political clout, such
as it is, to the fact that Judge Irwin supports him, Willie asks Jack if he
was able to discover anything sordid in Judge Irwin's past. Jack says that
he was, but he refuses to tell Willie what it is until he gives Judge Irwin
the opportunity to look at the evidence and answer for himself.
Jack travels to Burden's Landing, where he goes for a swim and watches a
young couple playing tennis, feeling a lump in his throat at his memories
of Anne. He then goes to visit the judge, who is happy to see Jack, and who
apologizes for being so angry the last time they spoke. Jack tells the
judge what MacMurfee is trying to do and asks him to call MacMurfee off.
The judge says that he refuses to become mixed up in the matter, and Jack
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